CHAPTER XXI. THE FIRST CONSIGNMENT
Since all that I can ever do for thee
Is to do nothing, may'st thou never see,
Never divine, the all that nothing costeth me.
One morning, three months later, Guy Oscard drew up in line his flying column. He was going back to England with the first consignment of Simiacine. During the twelve weeks that lay behind there had been constant reference made to his little body of picked men, and the leader had selected with a grave deliberation that promised well.
The lost soldier that was in him was all astir in his veins as he reviewed his command in the cool air of early morning. The journey from Msala to the Plateau had occupied a busy two months. Oscard expected to reach Msala with his men in forty days. Piled up in neat square cases, such as could be carried in pairs by a man of ordinary strength, was the crop of Simiacine, roughly valued by Victor Durnovo at forty thousand pounds. Ten men could carry the whole of it, and the twenty cases set close together on the ground made a bed for Guy Oscard. Upon this improvised couch he gravely stretched his bulk every night all through the journey that followed.
Over the whole face of the sparsely vegetated table-land the dwarf bushes grew at intervals, each one in a little circle of its own, where no grass grew: for the dead leaves, falling, poisoned the earth. There were no leaves on the bushes now, for they had all been denuded, and the twisted branches stood out naked in the morning mist. Some of the bushes had been roughly pruned, to foster, if possible, a more bushy growth and a heavier crop of leaves near to the parent stem.
It was a strange landscape; and any passing traveller, knowing nothing of the Simiacine, must perforce have seen at once that these insignificant little trees were something quite apart in the vegetable kingdom. Each standing with its magic circle, no bird built its nest within the branches—no insect constructed its filmy home—no spider weaved its busy web from twig to twig.
Solitary, mournful, lifeless the Plateau which had nearly cost Victor Durnovo his life lay beneath the face of heaven, far above the surrounding country—the summit of an unnamed mountain—a land lying in the heart of a tropic country which was neither tropic, temperate, nor arctic. Fauna had it none, for it produced nothing that could sustain life. Flora it knew not, for the little trees, with their perennial fortune of brilliant brown-tinted leaves, monopolised vegetable life, and slew all comers. It seemed like some stray tract of another planet, where the condition of living things was different. There was a strange sense of having been thrown up—thrown up, as it were, into mid-heaven, there to hang for ever—neither this world nor the world to come. The silence of it all was such as would drive men mad if they came to think of it. It was the silence of the stars.
The men who had lived up here for three months did not look quite natural. There was a singular heaviness of the eyelids which all had noticed, though none had spoken of it. A craving for animal food, which could only be stayed by the consumption of abnormal quantities of meat, kept the hunters ever at work on the lower slopes of the mountain. Sleep was broken, and uncanny things happened in the night. Men said that they saw other men like trees, walking abroad with sightless eyes; and Joseph said, “Gammon, my festive darky—gammon!” but he, nevertheless, glanced somewhat uneasily towards his master whenever the natives said such things.
A clearing had been made on that part of the Plateau which was most accessible from below. The Simiacine trees had been ruthlessly cut away—even the roots were grubbed up and burnt—far away on the leeward side of the little kingdom. This was done because there arose at sunset a soft and pleasant odour from the bushes which seemed to affect the nerves, and even made the teeth chatter. It was, therefore, deemed wise that the camp should stand on bare ground.